However, it was Korean electronic giant Samsung which stole the thunder from these multinationals with a slew of smartphone launches including Galaxy SIII.

"In India, we expect that the smartphone market will touch 17 million mark, which is nearly double the size in 2011. We expect the trend to continue," a Samsung spokesperson said, adding that a similar growth is expected for tablet PCs

and ultrabooks.

"Last year, the tablet PC market was about 500,000. We expect it to grow to 1.5 million this year. The ultabooks market this year is expected to be about 1.6 million," the spokesperson said.

According to research firm Gartner, over 1.2 billion mobile phones were sold in the January-September 2012 period, of which 479.94 million were smartphones.

Samsung's sold over 138 million smartphones during the period, while Apple and Research In Motion (RIM) sold over 85 million and 26.79 million smartphones, respectively.

Nokia sold 13.31 million and 7.2 million smartphones in the January-March and July-September 2012, respectively.

The year, however, did not bring much cheer for RIM. Though RIM's BlackBerry devices continued to gain traction in India, globally its market share declined.

However, RIM is betting on the new fleet of devices, to be launched in January, will revive its fortunes. RIM has said the new devices, featuring BB 10, will be faster and smoother than previous BlackBerry phones and will also have a larger bouquet of apps.

Apps were also big with consumers lapping up games like Angry Birds, to photo app Instagram to instant messaging apps like Whatsapp to navigation apps, making most of their smartphones.

In a massive victory, Apple won its patent case against Samsung, under which the Korean company was asked to pay more than USD 1 billion.

The ruling came after a jury in California found that Samsung had violated a series of Apple's patents related to software and design of mobile devices.

With high-speed Internet services like Long Term Evolution(LTE) on the anvil, sales of tablet PCs, ultrabooks and smartphones are set to increase further. The Indian government has set a target of 600 million high-speed Internet connections across the country by 2020.

The popularity of Google's Android powered devices has only grown during the year, with the operating system commanding 72.4 per cent share of the market.

Straight out of a sci-fi flick was Google's Project Glass, a product that would display information in